bash - Convert multiline string to array

Question

I have this script:

nmapout=`sudo nmap -sP 10.0.0.0/24`
names=`echo "$nmapout" | grep "MAC" | grep -o '(.+)'`
echo "$names"

now the $names variable contains strings delimited with newlines:

>_
 (Netgear)
 (Hon Hai Precision Ind. Co.)
 (Apple)

I tried to do the array conversion with the sub-string approach:

names=(${names//\n/ })
echo "${names[@]}"

But the problem is that I can't access them by indexing (i.e., ${names[$i] etc.), if I run this loop

for (( i=0; i<${#names[@]}; i++ ))
do
     echo "$i: ${names[$i]"
     # do some processing with ${names[$i]}
done

I get this output:

>_
 0: (Netgear)
 1: (Hon
 2: Hai

but what I want is:

>_
 0: (Netgear)
 1: (Hon Hai Precision Ind. Co.)
 2: (Apple)

I could not figure out a good way to do this, please note that the second string has spaces in it.

Answer 1

Set IFS. Shell uses IFS variable to determine what the field separators are. By default IFS is set to the space character. Change it to newline.

#!/bin/bash
names="Netgear
Hon Hai Precision Ind. Co.
Apple"

SAVEIFS=$IFS   # Save current IFS
IFS=$'
'      # Change IFS to new line
names=($names) # split to array $names
IFS=$SAVEIFS   # Restore IFS

for (( i=0; i<${#names[@]}; i++ ))
do
    echo "$i: ${names[$i]}"
done

Output

0: Netgear
1: Hon Hai Precision Ind. Co.
2: Apple